Brutal Legend (Review)

Thus far, I've enjoyed the work of Tim Schafer. Psychonauts was one of my favorite platformers from the previous console generation and Grim Fandango was a brilliant story driven title that the gaming industary needs more of. Brutal Legend sets itself up as Schafer's most ambitious project to date, what with it relatively long development time and the number of big name actors and rock legends lending their talent to it. The game tells the story of Eddie Riggs, a roadie for some shitty band. After a bizarre chain of events, he ends up summoning the metal God Ormagoden, and is teleported to the metal world. There, he meets the three people of Bladehenge, and learn that the leader Lionwhyte has enslaved their men and imprisoned their women. The overall story is not as well written or as unpredictable as Schafer's previous games, but it did at the very least make me want to move forward in the game at least to see where they were going with all of this and it the world that game presents shows the creators truly love heavy metal music (everything in the game looks like came from a album cover.).

The main characters have are well varied. Eddie is hilarious, while characters such as Lars and Lifa are serious and somewhat inspiring in their leadership. Villains, such as Lionwhyte are not only can be a bit humorous (at least in their appearance), but most of them represent the darker eras of metal (Glam rock, Emo). All the characters fit the universe well, and the performances are of high quality. The voice acting is top notch. Jack Black plays Eddie Riggs and does an excellent job, surprising since I've never found Jack Black to funny...period, but he really does solid work with the material. Also appearing here is Rob Halford (of Judas Priest) as Lionwhyte and Ozzy Osbourne as the Guardian of Metal, and you have some noteworthy metal credentials to the cast. The rest of the group are also voiced well even though I couldn't recognize most of them.

The gameplay is the typical mash-up of genres: sandbox, hack and slash, racing, and real time strategy. The hack and slash by itself is pretty good and dismembering enemies rarely gets old . Playing solos to unleash special attacks keeps the action fresh and the attacks themselves are quite impressive like the zeppelin crash attack or the facemelter (self-explanatory). The driving is ok, but most of the time I found the car hard to control. The car's brakes are practically non-existent, although thankfully, the game rarely has a need for them in missions. The side-missions can be fun but they get old and repetitive rather quickly as there are only about 5 or 6 different types of missions to take on. The RTS elements come in during the stage battles. The RTS element is very light and mostly simple which is great since this a genre I'm unfamiliar with. As an added bonus when things get hairy with the troops, you're able to jump down into the action and deal with things yourself.

The big problems with the game is that there is an over abundance of the RTS missions after they are introduced (pops up roughly ever 2 missions) and afterwards there's a rather ludicrous increase in difficulty making the game a bit of frustrating chore to finish, but luckily there isn't much left in the game from that point. I didn't get much time out of the game, but found it to be enjoyable. While Tim Schafer has come up with better games, I found something to enjoy from the second the game started until the credits began to roll. I can said that everyone at least needs to rent this title as it's hilarious and we need to see more inventive titles like this in the future.